"Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school."

Question: Noticed the link to "Ivy League" in your excerpt was identical to the link in the NYT article. Did you copy/paste and recreate the link, or are you using a special auto-excerpting too that did it for you automatically?

First: Sorry for 3 consecutive comments to the same post. Guess it's a view into my thought process/attention span when going from blog to linked article and back again.

Second: (or, um, third I guess...): The caption for the photo that goes with the article reads: "Todd Carlisle, left, an analyst at Google, and Laszlo Bock, right, a vice president..."

When I first saw the photo and read that text I almost posted a snarky comment that it was hard to discern who was on the right and who was on the left based on the angle of the photo, but stopped myself in the end for being too critical of the NYT. Then I almost fell out of my chair when I reached the end of the article and saw this:

"Correction: January 5, 2007

A picture caption on Wednesday with the continuation of a front-page article about the hiring practices of Google reversed the names of the two employees looking over a job application. Laszlo Bock, a Google vice president, was at right; Todd Carlisle, an analyst at the company, was at left."